An information system for assisting user's tasks, e.g., a backbone system, is equipped with a monitoring mechanism as a contrivance for monitoring occurrence of a failure or a sign of failure in order to ensure reliability. For example, a management terminal to manage the backbone system is provided for monitoring an information processing apparatus instanced by a monitoring target server within the backbone system by using a monitoring program. On the other hand, the monitoring target information processing apparatus is equipped with a mechanism to notify and record the failure or the sign of failure. The management terminal and the failure notifying/recording mechanism cooperate to configure the monitoring mechanism. The reliability of the information processing apparatus or the backbone system including the information processing apparatus can be ensured by checking an operation of the monitoring mechanism or verifying a function thereof. The check of the operation of the monitoring mechanism or the verification of the function thereof connotes checking a normal operation of a process of the monitoring mechanism to detect the failure or the sign of failure of the information processing apparatus, and notify a detected result to an external device instanced by the management terminal. The sign of failure connotes occurrence of a correctable error, occurrence of a recoverable failure not reaching a stop of the information processing apparatus, or that an occurrence count of correctable errors exceeds a certain threshold value. The management terminal detects the sign of failure, thereby providing information enabling an administrator of the information processing apparatus to determine to some extent when performing a maintenance work of the information processing apparatus and exchanging components thereof. It will hereinafter be simply called the verification of the monitoring mechanism to check the operation of the monitoring mechanism or verify the function thereof.
By the way, a vendor of the information processing apparatus develops the information processing apparatus including a processor installed in the information processing apparatus or the backbone system and other equivalent systems, in which case an operator of the vendor, the administrator and other equivalent persons can conduct the verification of the monitoring mechanism even after the information processing apparatus will have been shipped from a business place of the vendor and installed at a user site. For example, the vendor of the information processing apparatus incorporates a dedicated equipment instanced by a pseudo failure generation circuit into a self-processor, thereby enabling the verification of the monitoring mechanism for monitoring the information processing apparatus by generating a pseudo failure or a pseudo sign of failure at the user site as well.